Original subtitles

At the end of the 1800s a new art form flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man, Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Kyôko Kagawa

who was in perhaps the greatest movie ever made.

And Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous actor in the world.

And in the movies of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film, an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation across twelve decades,

six continents and a thousand films.

In this chapter Fahrenheit 911 takes the temperature of the real world

and a movie called Mullholland Drive plays with our dreams.

The 21st century came and movies filmed it.

Nature still looked lovely, cities looked even more.

Lots happened in innovative cinema in recent years.

One of the most surprising things was that editing lessened.

Slow cinema came to the fore.

But deep down, 21st-century movies

had been about what movies started out to be about.

The clash between reality and dreaming.

This is the story of that clash.

The story starts way back here with "Laurel and Hardy."

They're pulling a piano in the Swiss alps.

A studio set and painted backdrop.

We know something'll go wrong.

It always does.

But what?

What'll happen next?

That's the question the filmmakers asked and will always ask.

They racked their brains.

In those days, there was a guy on the set called "the wildy."

The wild man, often drunk, whose job was to come up with the bizarre ideas.

In this case the wildy suggested that they should meet a gorilla.

And here it comes.

Silly but funny.

Everything's okay.

From now on it's going to be easy sailing.

The wild man had innovated.

The gorilla was his innovation.

The story of film is the story of innovation.

The story of the gorilla.

And then look at this scene

from one of Hollywood's most surreal films Blonde Venus.

We're in a nightclub.

A frame densely packed.

Soft, top lighting.

The sort of lighting used to photograph Marlene Dietrich.

And then the reveal.

It is Marlene Dietrich.

She shed her skin and the sparkles of the dresses soften

because of a diffusion filter on the lens.

Hollywood at its most playful, absurd, new.

So since the new millennium, what's been new in cinema,

what's come at it, what's been the gorilla?

At first it looks like there hasn't been a gorilla.

That it's been business as usual.

The movies started with this documentary in 1895.

Workers leaving a factory, filmed square on.

But the big movie story of the new millennium

was that the reality came back.

At first, in the form of documentaries, which were suddenly big box office.

The first time in the whole story of film

that non-fiction cinema held its own on the big screen.

This happened in part because of what used to stand here.

When the twin towers fell, history got bigger.

The camcorder footage of 9/11 out-hollywooded Hollywood, image wise.

Fiction cinema looked a bit old hat in comparison

and reality was more dramatic than escapism.

This film, Fahrenheit 9/11,

was one of the biggest box office hits in the history of documentary.

It told a story about two families called Bush and Saud.

President Bush was being filmed as he heard about the attacks on the twin towers.

All director Michael Moore had to do was show the footage,

add a commentary and a clock in the corner of the screen

to make 2004's most memorable movie moment about power and indecision.

When the second plane hit the tower his chief of staff entered the class room

and told Mr. Bush, "the nation is under attack."

Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do,

and no secret service rushing in to take him to safety,

Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read "My Pet Goat" with the children.

Nearly 7 minutes passed with nobody doing anything.

As Bush sat in that Florida classroom, was he wondering if maybe

he should have shown up to work more often?

Fahrenheit 9/11 took over a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office,

something remarkable was happening in the story of film

because that's as much as this fiction entertainment film,

The Bourne Supremacy, released the same year.

But look at The Bourne Supremacy

and you notice how, like a documentary, it's trying to be.

Its director came from documentary.

These shots could have been much steadier, glossier, but rough documentary imagery

had become exciting and new in the 21st century,

so fiction films hitched a ride on it.

Documentaries held the screen for some years.

This film, Être et avoir, which came a bit before Fahrenheit 9/11, was a classic.

Observational, character based.

It's the end of the year in a rural school.

The teacher, Mr. Lopez, is retiring.

It's the last time he'll see the kids.

The camera is at the child's height, then, tilts up to capture his sadness.

Where heroes in fiction cinema often have to strike out

and fight the world, Mr. Lopez just stands there.

And yet he was one of the most vivid human beings on screen in 2002.

And Douglas Gordon's and Philippe Parreno's,

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, also a documentary,

was one of the most innovative films of its time.

It used extra-long lenses to film a football match,

but it didn't follow the story of the match,

so much as one, hypnotic, roving presence within it.

The presence, footballer Zinedine Zidane became almost mythic,

we heard his breathing, and his thoughts were subtitled even though he didn't speak.

At times he's so isolated and blown up that,

as in an Antonioni film, he almost dispersed.

Like a pointillist impressionist painting.

He had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh.

But it wasn't only in documentaries that reality bounced back

in the new millennium.

Look at this film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Look at its photography: Sepia.

Shallow focus.

No attempt to sex up the image, or make it look 21st century.

Or computer-y.

The defocusing of the edge of the image was done in part by a computer.

But if the way this famous face is photographed reminds us of anything,

it's the delicate photo-realism of a face like this:

Lillian Gish, softly lit.

Talk about coming full circle.

And where was all this post 9/11 realism heading?

In the direction of an intimate scene like this.

It's in Climates, [Iklimler]

one of the most innovative fiction films of the 21st century.

We're in Turkey now and a new master director,

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, has had Climates, shot digitally.

A hotel room.

A wife, in close-up.

A drip of water on the sound track.

We cut to her older husband, director Ceylan himself.

Shallow focus and his face half obscured.

Sad eyes.

Then a similar framing.

Each plane of focus so carefully chosen.

Then this focus pull and the pores on his forehead.

No dialogue or music.

Then this shot.

Where is the focus here?

The hand shows us.

Up close.

The camera's now lower than the bed.

And mysterious focus again.

The search for it makes us feel as if we are on the bed.

In the head of this sad marriage.

We think of Ingmar Bergman's sad films about marriage.

And then a naked light,

like a scene in an Italian Neo-realist picture.

And then it's over, whatever it was: sex?

The greatest use of focus in cinema.

Realist time stood still.

The gorilla, the sparky new idea in 21st century movies

was a very old idea, that real people still matter.

That tender realism is beautiful.

This honesty flowed from Turkey to Romania,

where great new honest pictures like this one emerged.

Welcome to new Romanian cinema.

This is Mr. Lazarescu.

We've followed him all night, from hospital to hospital,

which have all been full because of a bus accident.

We've watched him get worse and worse.

Now he's dying.

The woman in orange is a paramedic who's helped him all night.

Director Christi Puiu said that he wanted to use camerawork like the TV series ER.

Hand held, shooting in the round, dowdy greenish fluorescent lighting.

He used these techniques to show a long night's journey

into day and death, and the human decency of the paramedic.

The Death of Mister Lazarescu [Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu]

was one of the most moving works of film realism of the new century.

It passionately showed that we're all in this scary new century together.

Argentina's films in the new millennium boldly confronted reality too.

This is The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel.

Veronica is a well to do dentist.

Her phones goes.

Bam!

She's hit something.

Usually car accidents in movies are done with fast editing.

Here there's none.

Veronica's been crying.

Light rock music as counterpoint.

She tries to calm down, static camera, shallow focus.

Then she drives on.

We see what she hit.

A tense, tragic mysterious moment that gives the film its tone.

Then she stops.

She's probably concussed.

And as we see in the rest of the film, she keeps secrets

from her family and from herself.

You'd think the camera would go with her but it stays here.

Thunder then rain.

Then she's out of focus.

Headless.

A woman who's lost her head.

Veronica's isolation is brilliantly shown in this haunting, un-glossy movie.

One of the best ever made in South America.

And in Mexico in the 21st century,

cinema was brilliantly honest about human beings too.

Look at this scene.

A close up of a dark hand holding a light skinned one.

Then cut to this angle,

made famous by a renaissance painting of Christ by Mantegna.

The woman's thin, rich, privileged.

The man's her chauffeur.

Poorer, darker skinned, fatter.

Then the camera rises.

Music like at a funeral.

A blank room like a funeral parlor.

We get a god's eye view.

Or a Karl Marx eye view.

The social gap between them is so profound.

The only way of bridging it is through touch.

In this case sexual touch.

A moment ago they had sex and the camera did this.

Went out into the world

in this single uncut crane shot of more than three minutes,

to show workers taking down a TV aerial.

A Marriot hotel for tourists and rich people.

The back story of Mexico City.

The inequalities in Mexico are epic in scale,

and director Carlos Reygadas uses an epic crane shot,

to dramatize the enormity of the problem, the standoff.

Cinema, coming full circle, to show that sometimes there's a world

between two people, even as they cling to each other.

And if the realism of the new millennium wasn't rich enough,

Korean cinema suddenly darkened it and gave it a strange brutality.

The result was called "new Korean cinema."

There'd been good Korean movies since the 1920s and a golden age in the '60s.

But in the year 2003 alone, three movies show how daring it had become.

This is Lee Chang-dong's film, Oasis. [Oasiseu]

We're at a family party.

A man who's just out of prison is dominating the conversation,

talking nonsense.

He's anti-social.

He's brought with him an uninvited guest.

This young woman in the foreground who has cerebral palsy.

The situation is awkward.

More so when we hear that the woman is the daughter

of the man he's supposed to have killed.

And when they first met, he raped her.

And yet, somehow, these people have a friendship.

Maybe it's because both are spurned by their families.

New Korean cinema was transgressive.

Here's the ending of another 2003 Korean film,

Bong Joon-ho's, Memories of Murder. [Salinui chueok]

The film is set in the late '80s.

A serial killer has murdered ten Korean women,

a true story that scandalized the country.

This policeman's been trying to find the killer.

He's stopped his car and goes to look one last time

at the gulley where one of the victims was found.

Flat, deserted, yellow land, like the crop dusting scene

in Hitchcock's, North by North West.

POV Camera approaching the dark space.

Somehow we think of David Lynch films.

The tunnel seems haunted by the memory of the murder.

And then this: A girl.

But she reveals that she's probably seen the murderer.

A conversation, simply shot.

All through the film the detective has been hoping for such a breakthrough,

but now that it happens it's so ordinary.

A stare into camera.

Maybe the murderer is us.

More transgressive still was this new Korean film: Old Boy.

We're in a dark, stylized world.

This man was locked up for 15 years and not told why.

Now he's out and angry.

Almost comically angry.

He wants revenge.

The film was based on a Japanese manga cartoon book and it shows.

The man has found the place where he was imprisoned.

He's going to bash this security guard with a hammer.

And, as in a cartoon, he sees the hammer's trajectory.

Once he's in the prison we get this remarkable stylized fight scene.

We're in the prison corridor.

The wall nearest to us has been taken away.

A bit like in one of those wildlife programs

in which we see moles in their burrows underground.

The shot is far back and makes the scene look

like a cell in a cartoon.

Our man fights 14 other men.

Almost comic odds.

The camera keeps its distance on a Dolly.

Not handheld in the fight.

This isn't the realism of the early movies of the Lumière brothers.

New Korean cinema in the year 2003

was also doing something like the opposite to realism.

Stylized, dreamlike, magical almost.

Like this film, George Méliés, The Moon at one Meter,

one of the first science fiction films.

Theatrical.

Wearing it's dreaminess on its sleeve.

Movies in the new millennium were dreamlike as well as realistic.

The gorilla, the innovation in 21st century cinema

was dreamlike as well as naturalistic.

Film history coming full circle again.

In the most famous American movie about a dream,

The Wizard of Oz, a girl goes over a rainbow,

meets people from her real life, clicks her Ruby slippers together,

and discovers that there's no place like home.

The best dream film of the new millennium, Mulholland Drive,

is as if someone dreamed The Wizard of Oz dream.

It's about a girl who wants to climb the hill of movie stardom,

Mulholland Drive, where all the movie stars live.

But, instead, falls asleep and dives down into her own consciousness.

Down in that consciousness we hear of this dance in Ontario,

when she was a girl.

Her moment of innocence.

People jitterbug, shot against purple.

Their own shadows create moving digital windows

through which we see more layers.

This is the girl, luminous and smiling.

But then the girl grows up, falls in love with another girl,

and then gets so jealous of her that she asks this hit man to kill her.

Director David Lynch has the scene filmed conventionally,

shot-reverse shot, almost natural light, medium close ups, in a café called Winkies.

But out of the corner of her eye

the girls sees this man.

He looks at her as she arranges the murder.

Bang.

It's like he sees her commit the crime, the thought crime.

And so, in her long dream we see him, not her,

confronting something awful behind a wall at the back of Winkies.

Handheld camera.

A roar on the soundtrack.

A shock so great that everything goes silent.

The monster seems to be her terror at planning the killing.

She doesn't dream of herself confronting it but of the man who looked at her doing so.

And this place, Club Silencio, also in Diane's sub conscious,

is like Oz in The Wizard of Oz.

Diane's dream comes to a climax here.

She shakes because her subconscious is flooding.

A wizard conjures blue lights, disappears.

Light like we're under water.

Mulholland Dr. was so innovative because it was The Wizard of Oz

plunged into the black night of film noir and the rabbit hole of David Lynch's brain.

And then in the new millennium,

there was an astonishing dream film of sorts, Requiem for a Dream.

Anybody want to waste some time?

It looked with piteous recognition at people on drugs.

Angel says that this is the time, we should do it now.

Shit, I'm going to call Brody tomorrow.

Who's Brody?

That's my sweet connection.

He's got some unbelievable shit.

Righteous!

It was the great distortion movie about how drugs distort the world.

Speed it up, give it a fish eye lens.

Shit, man!

Then we get us a pound of pure and retire.

You know what that means?

No more hassle.

We get off hard knocks and be on easy street.

Shit.

What's the catch?

Here's the catch.

This woman wanted to be on TV so took far too many weight reduction pills.

Now she's scared by her own apartment.

It flickers, floats around her like a gyroscope.

Darren Aronofsky's film was a paranoid dream in a fearful century.

So if the story of film in the new millennium

has been the story of realist films and dream films,

that story is as old as movies itself.

There's nothing new there.

But in the new millennium,

film also combined reality and fantasy in new ways.

The line between them blurred.

They got closer to each other.

Look what we find here, in Stockholm.

The unique films of this man, Roy Andersson,

combine reality and dream in a new way

that few have ever done in the story of film.

You know, I was growing up in a worker family

and I grew up with that...

Impressions that people really humiliated each other and themselves also.

In Andersson's film, Songs from the Second Floor,

this man in the middle, covered in ashes has burnt down his business.

A serious social theme.

And the color in this shot is a drab green.

But suddenly the movie becomes heightened like a musical fantasy.

Unhappiness, it's not only the result of poorness,

without money, it's also the result of: What is richdom in life?

Is it money or... how to be happy so to say?

And I think that nowadays, in the last 30 years, people have been...

They are lost. They are lost.

In the extraordinary ending of Songs from the Second Floor,

symbols of religion are being dumped into a wasteland beyond the city.

We built the road of wood and we put in pieces to the right

so that you get the impression that there is a huge modern city there.

It's like the end of the world and then minutes into the uncut shot.

People who have been there the whole time,

stand up from the land, like the day of judgement.

It's a theme that I'm very, very interested in.

Namely the question of guilt.

Personal guilt and, even, collective guilt.

We are carrying a guilt, a collective guilt,

as representatives of the human being or mankind.

We are responsible and we have to get that feeling of guilt,

we have to get it reconciliated, to get rid of it.

And I think it's infected, it infects the society,

it infects our time, and I have that theme in Songs from the Second Floor.

And Andersson found a striking visual style

to show the humiliation, guilt and comedy of modern life.

He muted color.

Favoring grays and greens.

He loved plunging perspectives and flat Nordic light.

A bleak dream.

And his camera seldom moves.

I really don't want a single frame in my movie that is indifferent.

Visually indifferent.

And I mean that the modern way of filmmaking

contains a lot of indifferent frames.

Because they are built up to concentrate

on a very specific situation, most of the time killing or...

Yeah, on stupid situations.

Why can't movie has the same qualities as painting,

so you are fascinated by very... each single frame.

But what makes Andersson so significant for modern cinema

is that he combines this exactitude with a real sense of humor.

He's a fan of "Laurel and Hardy."

The simplicity of the way this scene is shot for example.

Square on, symmetrical.

And they are so tragic and so funny at the same time.

And it's two losers.

They want to be accepted by the middle class or upper class.

And they try so hard to get that, to come in to this,

to be accepted but they fail all the time, all the time.

It's not only simple jokes, it's also social tragedy,

political tragedy, of course.

It's the underdog's efforts to be accepted, to reach a higher level in society.

Andersson gets the gorilla, the innovation.

He partially funds his films himself, a one man movie studio.

A one man film history.

No-one has quite combined reality and dream like this before.

Twenty-first century cinema built on the past combining worlds.

In the '60s we saw how Stanley Donen, director of Singin' in the Rain,

used this split screen, to get around censorship

by making it look like two lovers are in bed together.

He filmed with two cameras at the same time and combined the shots.

Jump forward to the new millennium,

to this scene in Roger Avery's the Rules of Attraction.

Saturday morning on an American campus.

We've just watched, for several minutes, these two students get up and go to class.

Like Donen, Avery uses split screen, but has his characters look to camera,

to us, rather than each other.

Typical.

Never seen you there before.

We feel in the middle of this flirtatious moment.

Yeah.

You've got bad timing.

Saturday's suck ass.

I don't have to put up with this shit.

I'm dropping this fucking class!

Yeah, me too.

Really?

Mmhm.

I think I'm going to change...

But then she says, "show me your eyes."

And a hand takes his glasses off.

Show me your eyes.

And it's not his hand.

Then the cameras each pull out and swing round and the two world combine.

We go from inside the moment, to an outside observer.

Each camera's move was computer programmed

and the two images were digitally stitched together.

Movies have always tried to make people meet in memorable ways.

Few meetings are as memorable as this one.

And in this film, Avatar, computers also helped create

new 21st-century syntheses of reality and fantasy.

In real life this character is a marine, who,

because he's in a wheelchair, can't walk or run.

But here he's on a mission to the planet Pandora

and has been transformed into an attenuated creature

who enjoys the sprint, moves like a dancer.

Canadian director James Cameron has his camera flow,

the creature move, he feels the soil between his toes.

Hey, marine!

Grace?

Well, who did you expect, Numbnuts?

Think fast.

Everything about this scene was animated on computers,

as you'd expect, except the most important thing.

The facial expressions.

This energetic documentary shows

that the faces were filmed with mini-cameras.

The set of a modern Sci-Fi film looks like a factory.

Bright lights, computers, no hint of an enchanted planet.

Director James Cameron is excited by the process.

You know, there's a carbon fiber boom that comes out

with a little camera on the front of it.

And that camera shoots the face in a nulled out close up.

So, even though the actor is moving all around,

running, jumping, yelling, screaming, jumping off stuff,

jumping over logs, you know, running flat out, whatever.

We're getting that facial performance absolutely locked off.

This split screen in the documentary shows the after and before.

Twenty-first century cinema managed to insert the mystery

of human feeling into a digital and electronic universe.

But far away from Hollywood, in Thailand in the new millennium,

Apichatpong Weerasethakul did something even more inventive.

Look at this scene from Tropical Malady.

A Thai soldier, Keng, and his farmer friend Dong.

Two shy young men in Thailand, filmed in natural light,

in long takes, in the languor of summer days.

A backdrop so still that it looks almost painted.

Then, about half way through the film, it seems to break down.

There's black, and then the story starts again.

This time we're in a forest.

A soundtrack full of the night chorus of insects, frogs, and cicadas.

This time soldier Ken is lit by moonlight.

He sees a tree full of fireflies.

It's like the Eiffel Tower lit up.

We hear that his friend, Dong, has become a tiger.

He must hunt him.

Director Weerasethakul films the spirit of a water buffalo leaving its own body.

Keng's breathless, agog.

Seeing life and death and the gaia.

The spirit takes him into the forest.

Not only has the farmer been re-incarnated as a tiger,

but the film seems to have been re-incarnated,

from a naturalistic tale of friendship, to a mythic tale of hunter and hunted.

Seldom in the whole history of cinema has such a bold story shift happened.

The wild man, the gorilla.

Our last examples of wildly inventive cinema

in the new millennium come from this man, Alexander Sokurov.

This is his film, Mother and Son. [Mat i syn]

We're in a Russian cottage in the countryside.

A mother's dying.

Her son tends her.

She's happy to die in her son's arms.

The pearly light is in the trees outside.

They whisper to each other.

Utter peace.

Sokurov explains his approach.

Mother and Son is one of the defining movies

in what would come to be called "slow cinema."

Director Sokurov's imagery is as beautiful as his teachers, Andrei Tarkovsky's,

but also derives from painting.

And, in shots like this, Sokurov had the image stretched diagonally

as if it was made of rubber, to change how we see it.

Many critics felt that Mother and Son was one of the best films of its time.

But then Sokurov made this film.

Perhaps the most inventive ever made.

The greatest gorilla in film history.

We're in the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg,

at the end of the 19th century.

These tsarist aristocrats have been partying all night

and now they're flowing down the steps, like a river.

But the revolution is coming.

This will be the last of the great balls.

Soon they will be dead.

Sokurov saw the film as the single last breadth

of this civilization and so, astonishingly, he filmed the whole movie in a single take.

There hasn't been one cut in the whole film.

This shot has travelled 1,300 meters, through 33 galleries, filming 867 people:

Cavaliers, museum officials, spies, great balls, and portents of the horrors to come.

Over 90 minutes.

Sokurov and his team rehearsed for 6 months.

Filming took place on 23rd December, when there are only 4 hours of daylight.

This allowed for just two takes.

Take one had to be abandoned after five minutes.

Then take two, this one unfolds.

Unbelievable tension.

The steadicam so heavy that the operator almost buckles at the knees in pain.

Here's documentary footage of the moment the filming finished.

Their breath's show how freezing it was.

The handheld camera captures the relief.

Tears of joy that something entirely new in the story of film had taken place.

TV cameras to capture this moment.

The camera mills around with the people.

Moved, tired, exhilarated.

Sokurov is one of the most serious filmmakers of the 21st century

and one of the most stylistically daring.

He and the filmmakers like him suggest that the future of cinema

is in provocative hands.

If the history of film has been the story of innovation,

of passion, of breaking the mold,

what's its future?

Maestro di Angeles, here in the Roman film studio, Cinecitta,

made props for Fellini but long after he's gone,

will people still be breaking the movie mold?

Maybe in the year 2046,

movie going will be like Christopher Nolan's film Inception.

It's an innovative Sci-Fi film about layers of reality

but maybe it's a metaphor, too, for what film going could become.

Look at this scene.

Leonardo DiCaprio and his friends wake up in a plane.

They've just been dreaming together.

The camera glides.

Greens and blues.

Atmospheric beds of music.

They're groggy.

Embarrassed almost at the intimacy of the dream they've just shared.

They dreamt they were in this van, falling ultra-slowly off a bridge.

Shot at maybe 1,000 frames per second.

No natural sound.

But in it, they dream a dream within a dream,

in which they're in a hotel whose gravity is on the blink.

It's color coded orange.

The camera floats.

The actors are on wires.

And in that dream within a dream, they dream a fourth layer.

They're in a James Bond style battle in a snow lodge.

Now the camera's handheld.

The action's edgy.

The sound natural.

The dominant color's white.

They live and die together.

Maybe this is what movie going is like in 2046.

Playing a game of living and dying together.

Plunging into an underwater YouTube.

Or maybe something awful happens.

Look at this scene in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Former lovers Joel and Clementine are running through grand central station.

People start to disappear because they are undergoing a brain washing process

where their memories of their relationship are being removed.

Then the brain washing becomes a nightmare.

It's shot like a TV crime program.

The camera's roving around, with a light on it.

Their past, their stories, disappearing.

She no longer has a face.

You're erasing me from...

I don't know.

You got this thing.

I'm in my bed.

I know it.

My brain!

I'm part of your imagination too, Joel.

How can I help you from there?

I'm inside your head...

The eyes on another face are upside down.

What if the same happened to film?

Maybe there'll be some digital or ideological storm

and cinema will be wiped or banned.

And it will be impossible to see it.

Except in a hidden bunker or room like this

where all its treasures are kept, in secret.

If so, then those of us who loved the movies

will have to remember them, talk about them, tell the story of them.

Of the people who made them.

The places where they were made.

The objects that appeared in them.

Even the places where the great filmmakers sat and thought.

Or maybe movies will take up a bigger part in our lives.

This is what the city of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso looked like in 2011.

At the very center of the city is this huge monument to cinema.

Maybe more cities will do this.

Back in 2011, filmmakers from around the world

gathered at this monument, held hands in the sweaty heat

and walked around it three times,

in tribute to the filmmakers who had died in the previous year.

And, to the movies.

Synced and corrected by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today